Regularly-scheduled maintenance of an aircraft and other similar manufactured products has both operational and economic impacts on the daily business affairs of the overall aircraft fleet. It is important to precisely determine desired times or intervals for performing maintenance tasks to efficiently run an airline.
A lifetime distribution model may be utilized to provide a statistical lifetime of the parts on a manufactured product, and therefore enable a means to better determine a time frame in which maintenance should be performed on any given part. During the manufacture of a large-scale product such as an aircraft, one part in particular may be used in multiple locations throughout the aircraft.
In particular, the lifetime distribution model only traditionally accounts for a first instance of failure of the part. As such, the overall lifetime derived for the part does not reflect multiple instances of failure of the part on the manufactured product. This often results in an overly conservative estimate regarding the true underlying lifetime of the part. Therefore a need exist to provide a more accurate estimate of the true lifetime distribution of a part such that, as a result, maintenance intervals may be more accurately determined for the part.